I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee. Wherefore I abhor myself and repent, being but dust and ashes.

Job 42:5-6

They say that pride comes just before a fall
I have fallen and I wasn't proud
You know that I have fallen further before
I just cannot stand fallin no more

Jason Pierce

Sing! mortal evil, afore the earth before the heavens thou wert, formlessness thou wert gainst wishing formed. Shine! vital countenance coeternal pon this gnomon guise circled by shadow puzzling the celestial wards whereout issues rain from the lazaret, the fathomless blank intersticing the galaxies and veil to the empyrean and how be it the bruited wells of blackness shade not these stars, this sun, and the pails where are they for to haul up the shroud and reclaim the matter.

She eats the belles. Has eaten the last of the girl. Other girls shuffle in their summer dresses to hear sermons that learn none dread. Afterwards is a plaited girleen strayed from church and parish and forthwith she is nake slaughtered in the shack and coupled to at the loins. She eats bread from her belly. She drinks the wine.

Hark then these voices of men resounding up the cold face of the mountain. They tramp the switchbacks a few days and go back.

In the villages now are wards to which she knows no excantations. She slingshots a raven out of the sky and stuffs it with human teeth and wraps it in human skin and wears it on her back. She stalks the hexen not gimpen not undesirable to her earthen hütte and sits upon a knoll in its clear view.

Six days in siege. She hears chanting in the nights. On the seventh day the hexen attempts a parley and is shot through the skull.

The hütte has a strange stock. Poultices. Jars. Newt eyes and grimalkin tails, ground bones of babes and bat claws. The ash of brogans. Bloody pages of old books in no tongues long forgotten. A drowned landsman's map. The recorded prayer of a girl drowned in a cistern. Soviet amulets. Pictures of the dead, chamrs of warlocks, old chesspiece kings. The shivs of prisoners and the keepsafes of nuns.

What they in their full potency can conjure is as nothing to the industrialized butchery to come, so many years in preparation. Lo the witches pray for the recall of what none may call back. It is already here. Has already been. Who can do even sinning wrong.

She goes a revanchist, a nominal harbinger of murderous theogony derived out the narcomaniacal yearnings of privation and a thousand miles of conifers. Moving in auditory nihilism what could not fathom the nemoral songs of birds and so in dismissive solipsism attributed the very symphony of life to the claustral earth so as to say no meaning to them at all. She scratched her teeth to rid them of itch. Sublimate this intellect, be it a hearth, let it not loose on the world. But it is loose and in the world.

On a certain morning she came down from the mountain in followance of that tributary leading to the bluff wherein stairs were carved. She went up and hammered on the steel door with the stock of her mosin but there was no answer. She pulled at the hatch. It creaked like anciency. The light that fell inside seemed the first in a long time and seemed slow in its filling of the confines as if the dark within had been caught sleeping.

She moved through the close maze and out into a vaulted hall. She checked the rooms. The filthy kitchen, the empty larder. In the mess hall was an antique arcade game whose play was a pixelated B17 bombing a bird's eye caricature of the western front. A stool before it. Thick layers of dust on the seat. She played. Bombed panzers, trenches, AA nests. The cries of the gray shapes of infantry infantry distorted in the speakers. A V2 rocket shot her avatar down. She went on to the squad bay. Bunks lined the bay like unfinished cages. She could hear him breathing at the rear of the bay somehow on a top bunk. His legs were slathered in a flesh colored pus dripping down through the springs. She climbed onto the bunk next his. He didnt notice. His shirt was open and sweat beaded on his chest, his brow. She nudged his shoulder. Eyes like saucers in that black face. Squinting in the dim light that fell from the ceiling he well could see her his visitor and pushed himself up.

Git out. Git out.

These commands seemed to tax him to the brink and he held his throat as if he had thrown up the words by force. In his breast pocket she could see a bight of maroon. Beads or some other jewelry.

I sayed I doan known yuh but if Ida known yuh was the devil Ida said. Ida mohved dese legs ta yuh. Is do it now.

He reached for her and she rolled sideways and climbed down from the bunk. He laid back down.

She looked about the spartan confines. Dust concrete and worn. She reached into her pocket and took out a sachet of blackberries and stood a tip toe and placed them at the foot of his bunk.

I bout kill yo daddy I heard what he done but Is wished he done it sooner fo you was old nuff to crawl back out.
Even that very noon she dredged the surrogate from the garden. It had been interred almost a year and it came apart in her hands. She hauled it up arm by skull by spine. A soily brisket woven to corset by dropwort. She compiled the bones in the fireplace with those of her matriarch but anger alone cannot make a fire to start. Her hands smelled of cosmoline. She had mended her rancid costumes with shot patches and bloodstained linens and spools of stitchwire saved out the mutilations of her own person and she seemed some aposematic refugee scaped from who knew what carnival disaster. She had a crude leather satchel fabricated badly out of the flensed hides of children and she girded her waist with four belts fashioned from the same with scalp hair swinging strawberry or blond tailed pony or pig. She watched the stars from her perch and she watched jealous hued omen come down and she set out.

In those end days of summer it was rain and rain and nights awash in caves. The ruddy sunsets behind sawtoothed ridges where virga licked the tenuous fires of a few lone expatriates or plemena camped deep in the stony recesses like men exiled to the very corners of the world mayhaps in wait of a cue.

Travailing a vale of birch and broadleaf she spotted high above a kind of pale glowing polymorph she thought might belong to Shura. She climbed the steepness of the mountain slope swinging trunk to trunk or scrabbling on fours until she reached the bright night limned mouth of the cave.

He was a forger when she looked, no trade she knew. He sat at his credenza punching a brass keyboard fashioned after a typewriter. He didnt notice her for a long while. He did so but gradually. A dim apprehension of something out of place. He peered into the dark without his abode a full minute before he patterned the shape of her standing there.

Come in.

She edged into the light.
Come in.

She entered the cave. She pointed at the electric lamps strung about. The forger glanced at them. At his press, his stamps and printers. Histories. Pictures. He looked at a stack of passports amidst the clutter. She went over to his desk and took up a pen and unscrewed the nib from the tubes and unscrewed the tubes from another and emptied out the refill and the spring. She stared at the wall. When the forger looked to see what it was she looked at she looked at the ground. Then she reached for one of the passports. Inside the lines were blank, the portrait an empty space. Beyond were colorful pages with images like lithographs of old cities long since destroyed and other cities yet to be. As if each depiction of ruin were a chronicling, each city whole a promissory of things which could be brought back, be made right again.

Yes, he said placing his hand on the stack, do you want something made?

She searched her clothes and offered up for his inspection her own documents. Brown worn leather. He regarded the coat of arms with his eyes and then he opened the booklet and read the data page line by line. He looked at the signature.

This was signed in aienee, he said. Dagestai John Anaya Adelinda Vilate Hasti. Quite a name.

His right eye telescoped out to study the watermarks and then he scanned the barcode and then he mated a cable to the chip below her name.

Is it Dachni or Catherine? he said.

Dachni squirmed her shoulders.

He handed her passport back to her. Youre already ready. This is genuine. Theyll take you anywhere.

Dachni smacked her fist against her lips.

What?

She did it again and again tappingly.

Are you hungry?

She kept tapping.

I have a barrel of pistachios.

Dachni nodded strangely and then rolled her head about her shoulders.

I dont know what that means. Are you hungry? I have elk too. If I can ask where did you get those scars? They are extensive.

Dachni shrugged up her garments.

If youll permit Id like to photograph them for my work. I have portfolios of scars, burns, blemishes, imperfections. Defects. Amputations. Everything. Im always collecting.

She shook her head.

It will be a hurt upon another person.

She shook her head again.

Well. Do you want me to make you something?

And a third time.

The forger met his fingertips together. There isnt rest but you can stay here tonight. Theres a sleeping bag in the back. It wont do but its there.

She moved carefully past the forger to the back of the cave where were reams of silicon paper and androids by the hundreds in the fetal position and new. She let down her gear and found the sleeping bag and crawled in. She lay for a long while. Then she took out her passport and looked at the unmarred visage staring blankly back from behind the laminate and disbelieved it. She watched the forger at his work. His fingers danced across the keyboard. He leaned near to the screen. His hands were augmentations and the fingers styluses and from time to time he would draft in the air with singular grace and address. Old artisan crafting false face and false history for the false men he would have walk the world.

Are you awake? When the hero goes forth from his kingdom he can bring back only two things. What restores his people. Or what destroys them. But myths ignore many things. They do not say that while he goes he may return to nothing. That he was not in time to save the kingdom. Or that someone else had saved it. They do not say that he left no kingdom. That it was already dead before he left and that there was nothing he could do to save it.

She was up before the dawn but the forger had not yet slept nor did he seem to slack in his work. She climbed atop his desk and stepped gingerly between the documents and scrawled a happier image of him at his labors and then she filled her pockets with pistachios from the barrel and took a pound of meat and the mouse of his laptop and left out. He waved. Nothing more.

Hey thanks I found them too. Dredge should be dredged, missing an 'a' and an 'at' somewhere, had an inconsistency with the forger's glasses. needed an m on 'Fro'. Minor stuff. Nake though is a word

So this is the sequel to me first novel Things Fall Apart. Its gonna be a five year project or thereabouts maybe more, its predecessor was nine years in the making. Ill keep posting as it goes but everything posted will be first draft. Afterwards I clean it up and keep it for when I'm ready to submit for publishing. So yeah. Glad you like it

coeternal pon this gnomon guise circled by shadow puzzling the celestial wards whereout issues rain from the lazaret, the fathomless blank intersticing the galaxies and veil to the empyrean and how be it the bruited wells of blackness shade not these stars, this sun, and the pails where are they for to haul up the shroud and reclaim the matter.

Now that just looks like a load of pompous and meaningless waffle to be frank.

She eats the belles. Has eaten the last of the girl.

Hyphen, semi-colon, colon after 'belles'?

Other girls shuffle in their summer dresses to hear sermons that learn none dread.

'...sermons that teach. None dread this'?

Afterwards is a plaited girleen strayed from church and parish and forthwith she is nake slaughtered in the shack and coupled to at the loins. She eats bread from her belly. She drinks the wine.

hexen not gimpen

I don't understand this.
Six days in siege. She hears chanting in the nights. On the seventh day the hexen attempts a parley and is shot through the skull.

The 'hexen' is a witch? My question above answered? Still interested what a 'gimpen' is-presumably not, in this context, someone in a skintight leather costume and face mask!

The hütte has a strange stock. Poultices. Jars. Newt eyes and grimalkin tails, ground bones of babes and bat claws. The ash of brogans. Bloody pages of old books in no tongues long forgotten. A drowned landsman's map. The recorded prayer of a girl drowned in a cistern. Soviet amulets. Pictures of the dead, chamrs of warlocks, old chesspiece kings. The shivs of prisoners and the keepsafes of nuns.

I found this quite a vivid evocation of a (presumed) witch's lair. Except, the allusion to 'soviet amulets' is odd. 'Soviet' as in 'soviet union'? From the language, I assumed there was a medieval-to-seventeenth-century setting. The allusion to 'shivs of prisoners' is likewise jarring, as evoking the slang of twentieth-century America.

Who can do even sinning wrong.

Don't understand this bit.

She goes a revanchist, a nominal harbinger of murderous theogony derived out the narcomaniacal yearnings of privation and a thousand miles of conifers. Moving in auditory nihilism what could not fathom the nemoral songs of birds and so in dismissive solipsism attributed the very symphony of life to the claustral earth so as to say no meaning to them at all.

More pompous and meaningless waffle.

She moved through the close maze and out into a vaulted hall. She checked the rooms. The filthy kitchen, the empty larder. In the mess hall was an antique arcade game whose play was a pixelated B17 bombing a bird's eye caricature of the western front.

We're in the future? Quite a shock revelation!

Git out. Git out.

These commands seemed to tax him to the brink and he held his throat as if he had thrown up the words by force. In his breast pocket she could see a bight of maroon. Beads or some other jewelry.

I sayed I doan known yuh but if Ida known yuh was the devil Ida said. Ida mohved dese legs ta yuh. Is do it now.

He reached for her and she rolled sideways and climbed down from the bunk. He laid back down.

She looked about the spartan confines. Dust concrete and worn. She reached into her pocket and took out a sachet of blackberries and stood a tip toe and placed them at the foot of his bunk.

I bout kill yo daddy I heard what he done but Is wished he done it sooner fo you was old nuff to crawl back out.

Quotation marks for speech?

When the hero goes forth from his kingdom he can bring back only two things. What restores his people. Or what destroys them. But myths ignore many things. They do not say that while he goes he may return to nothing. That he was not in time to save the kingdom. Or that someone else had saved it. They do not say that he left no kingdom. That it was already dead before he left and that there was nothing he could do to save it.

I finally get the outline of a plot, here. The old lady is going to travel to save the kingdom, or try to, in some unspecified way. At least that sets up some intrigue as to what she is going to do and why.

@Lazarus So Im new to the site but not new to writing and having written in my style for years I take no umbrage against accusations of pomposity or windily speech which at my worst I fall into. And fair criticism is fair criticism and I am oft in error and am against defending one's own work as a matter of course however I do take cue from Kubrick who being accused of being a misanthrope responded to a review of A Clockwork Orange as a means to denounce this categorization and show that he at least knew what he was talking about as I hope to do here now. Let me say foremostly I'm not harping on you but I will only do this once as I intend to be on the site some years until the completion of this project and this might as well be said at the onset.

So the opening line addresses an individual whose identity is ambiguous. For now all we know of it is that it exists because it is being commanded. The only quality we know of it is that its evil and that its mortal. Now mortal has about nine definitions and depending on which you employ the meaning of the sentence changes. Mortal can mean human, it can be an indication of severity a mortal wound or mortal enemy, it can mean that it goes in attendance with death or that it itself is lethal or you could go with the hopeful reading and say that this evil is killable. So all these definitions are tied up and you can read it which way you feel best fits the context of the novel but its something that resists absolute certainty and this is in part the point of literature. Now all that said we have the subject and then were given new information about it. That against its wishes it was conceived so this an enormous revelation as to the personality of the entity and its possible motivations.

Now the second sentence addresses a different subject, the vital countenance, and its demarked from the first by their temporality. The mortal evil which is given form contrasts with the coeternal as all form is perishable. So we know theres multiple actors here. The narrator, the mortal evil, the coeternal. As theyre introduced they inhabit a state of ambiguity that is clarified in the latter half of the second sentence as an unknown subject is likened to a gnomon which links it in two ways with the first subject, in that it has form and that it has temporality as a gnomon is a primitive clock. Then is this evil's shadow shown to be circling it and here we see retroactively the resolution of the two subjects and their relation to another for the sun is literally shining on it. Again shine has an expansive connotational history of poetical employments but I wont get into that again as its redundant. As the sentence progresses we learn more about this evil, that its puzzling over the cosmos and this admission is followed by a series of questions for which the narrator serves as interlocutor concerning the cosmos and the nature of darkness.

And then finally to solidify the identity of this first subject, the mortal evil, we see in the next paragraph that she eats other children and copulates with their corpses. If that isnt evil I dont know what is. Of course the identity of the first subject, the mortal evil, remains in suspense but it can be reasonably argued that here at least is a manifestation of it.

Theres much more to get into here but Im going to stop now because I hope by now the point is made. My concern isnt mischaracterization or being disliked or being criticized or corrected. I am very often wrong and I will say I am very grateful for your comments. My concern is that people who detect some meaning will decide to forgo any further delving because someone else has branded the whole mess incoherent and meaningless. And meaninglessness is synonymous with nihilism which seems to the be the ultimate objective of postmodernism in its endless deconstruction of systems, something which I fervently reject.

I say all this with great reservation, not to embarrass anyone, not to be pedantic or to show off, but to conclude that flatly stating that a passage, a piece of music, of sculpture, of art in general is incomprehensible and thus meaningless without citing why it is so is unhelpful. And let me be clear now I am not accusing you of intellectual laziness but perhaps do note something of a reactionary dismissiveness to things not easily at first understood.

Heh well the first novel Ive begun submitting to agents so maybe in a year you can read it if it gets picked up, its alright ill be posting updates once a week in this thread. The Mere Tide is a true sequel to Things Fall Apart so maybe stop reading? I don't know, nothing's been spoiled yet and nothing will be. As for the hero. Well Dachni our little eight year old necrophiliac is the hero. Before her in Things Fall Apart the pilot was the hero and she was an alien king who went around murdering everyone. Here's the opening for TFA (this thing clocked in at 290K words) and sorry but you cant get more than this

Ere fall the stones of heaven. The flare and the thunderclap and the stars driving headlong their downward course along the vapory shores of the world like a spread of gems on a wheel. The day was one of August, just so. The storms had not gone and the sun not come up yet in some farther quadrant of that glinting cupola the night had grown luminescent for the plummet of a point of sapphirine light like an egg. Old eosphorus unslotted at last. Tumbling twixt the nomadic house of war, the wandered house of sea and bearing across the horizon like a comet and with portents no less dire towards a parched and godless earth like some fiery absconder, fugitive among its brethren.

A ship then, such a ship as it is. A carrier twirling mutely aglow like a crude windup toy loosed of its gears. Its silvered hull blushing white and peeling fast away and the peeled plates winking phosphorescent in the wet midnight like chaff and the metal skirts molten with the heat belling upwards against a furious drift as if they had the constancy of wax and the spires unmoored from its belly turned in its wake like the splintered lances of knights invisible but for the stars eclipsed by their passing. And the engines fired madly. The twinned set mounted in the stern were one dead and the other dying, the portside machinery sputtering smoke from the exhaust and the starboard detached and disintegrating in midair and the whole of the ship descending like some pyrogenic ore loosed from the sun.

All that night figures could be seen egressing the wreckage. Beings like stenciled apparitions shifting shade to shade in the warping firelight like the faint afterlives of some violent sect of the damned who in this vague existence bore a semblance of man and were perhaps of as much substance. They stitched across the face of the waters bleeding and dying and crying aloud for the intercession of a pantheon no less silent than those ravenous entities who cry themselves for blood and the blood of sons and more blood. And then they are gone in the darkness.

In the raw redness of the dawn the pilot appears. Fallen out this glass fanged portal pursued by fire adown this welted superstructure. To tarmac. It rises. It goes to the edge of the ship and steps off into a roiling rutilant smoke. Far below a dull slap of water. The waves crashing into another. And stilling. And stilling. It bursts upwards and a bloody froth regurgitates into a blackish harbor beclot with corpse through which it must wade like some doleful sinner wrought out of a lake of blood. To this shore where fire has barbered the sedge. Up this embankment of ash, this concrete webbed by fissure, under a crumbled bridge where gray gilleted crows roost in terror on the girders. It looks up, all their avians eyes upon it, goes on. Ascends the narrow turns of these stairs. At the top a guardrail in improbable contortion. Here the road. Slabs of macadam like a pair of ophidian vertebrates hammered out upon the earth whereon in scattering its fellow starfarers sit bestilled by the sheer immensity of their infortunes.

A few turned to watch it. That dark ananias. As if it were some fabled faith healer called upon to bring out the dead among that rabble of bloodblacked maimfolk no less drenched in blood itself. A parabolic gash wound about its right adder's eye and that eye was cracked and flushed with blood, the capillaries all broken up and a hellish terra incognita contained within those tinctured pupils. Its right arm was splayed to a silver sheening bone and its trousers were wet with blood and its jacket wore dark unblinking eyelets around little shards of glass like the monuments of a rabid and parasitic denomination and its undershirt clung to it like a scab. In these tattered cerements it seemed a creature baptized in the liquefied bones of prior species as if somehow this impostor had usurped the blessing of antecessors with whom no lineage was shared save in the common temporality derived from that elemental egg which exploded the universe.

Nothing was said and it shambled mutely past the mazy ranks of the stunned and inambulate to the border of a sylvan hell beyond the roadside whereupon a rude stump like a throne it set and beheld the dusty gotterdammerung land where had terminated its fall.

A broiling hellscape. General with fire and germed with sparks flurried on searwinds blown for to gasp the land dry. In the west lay an apocalyptic backtrack through an old world forest. A long breach of trees erred and smoking like censers along a cauterized trough. Its eyes drifted. Here I am. All before an inferno. All behind a cinerary waste.

The pilot didnt know how long it set there. When it woke it was without knowledge that it had woken or even that it had slept at all. Standing before it now was a waterbearer. A diminutive creature in a shawl of silicate rage. It carried in its arms an urn and it gave it...him. Her. Gave her water to drink. Tilting up the urn by the base. The pilot closed her eyes. The water was cool and good. When the urn let down again she opened her eyes and the waterbearer was staring back at her frail and unafraid in a clapping hurricane of fire that absolved in one ashy gust this benevolent phantom from sight and no amount of scrying would recall even a trace of it for it was gone. Nor was there any other to see for save herself there was no soul other upon the road for even from that nubilated terrain had the sun routed the survivors for all that they had yet been in darkness.

My concern is that people who detect some meaning will decide to forgo any further delving because someone else has branded the whole mess incoherent and meaningless.

They can't have much courage in their convictions, if they do.

Originally Posted by bluewpc

flatly stating that a passage, a piece of music, of sculpture, of art in general is incomprehensible and thus meaningless without citing why it is so is unhelpful

Okay, I should maybe have said 'in my opinion' that the words seemed meaningless as I found the sequences of words used largely impenetrable and vague in what they were trying to convey, whether it be intended images or abstract thought or emotion.

First off the reasoning is fair enough. Lord knows I can be excessive in writing so Ill see about streamlining it for clarity.

On another note something perhaps a tangent to the above conversation the courage of people. Well I think the tragedy is that most people don't have any courage when it comes to their convictions and are for whatever reason perfectly willing to shut up and go along with the crowd. The evidence for that is all around us. Take a look at the campaign. How many people repudiate Trump in private but are unwilling to risk their careers in opposing him or people who look at BLM with concern and would speak up but for fear of being labeled a racist.

Obviously political examples but the same holds true in every sphere of human interaction. If we take this back to the realm of art Ill argue that artists are the custodians of a civilization. For better or worse they are the ones who select what in a culture is forgotten or remembered and as artists we enshrine certain events of history in the cultural memory as moments when its values are most fully expressed.

The Alamo is an instance of this with its dozens of films, ballads, plays, books, what have you that depict selflessness, a willingness to hold certain values as more valuable than life, of courage, of morality. Take the examples of the captivity narratives of the Puritans who saw their experiences as tests of faith and acts of spiritual regeneration. Or the dust bowl, immortalized in the Grapes of Wrath. The Romans had Virgil, the Greeks had Homer.

But of course culture isn't static, it experiences epochs. The western culture has in its resume the Greeks, the Romans, the Germans, The Anglos, the Irish, the Indians, even Semitic influences distilled through the King James Bible.

For the layman to reckon with these influences is I think asking the impossible and thus it falls to the artist who dedicates his life, who more than likely will fail, to this grappling in order that his civilization is constantly renewed through the production of new works and new interpretations which are really new modes of thought. Absent of these efforts a civilization quickly becomes shorn of its historical and cultural roots and very quickly stagnates and dies.

Heh well the first novel Ive begun submitting to agents so maybe in a year you can read it if it gets picked up, its alright ill be posting updates once a week in this thread. The Mere Tide is a true sequel to Things Fall Apart so maybe stop reading? I don't know, nothing's been spoiled yet and nothing will be. As for the hero. Well Dachni our little eight year old necrophiliac is the hero. Before her in Things Fall Apart the pilot was the hero and she was an alien king who went around murdering everyone. Here's the opening for TFA (this thing clocked in at 290K words) and sorry but you cant get more than this

Ere fall the stones of heaven. The flare and the thunderclap and the stars driving headlong their downward course along the vapory shores of the world like a spread of gems on a wheel. The day was one of August, just so. The storms had not gone and the sun not come up yet in some farther quadrant of that glinting cupola the night had grown luminescent for the plummet of a point of sapphirine light like an egg. Old eosphorus unslotted at last. Tumbling twixt the nomadic house of war, the wandered house of sea and bearing across the horizon like a comet and with portents no less dire towards a parched and godless earth like some fiery absconder, fugitive among its brethren.

A ship then, such a ship as it is. A carrier twirling mutely aglow like a crude windup toy loosed of its gears. Its silvered hull blushing white and peeling fast away and the peeled plates winking phosphorescent in the wet midnight like chaff and the metal skirts molten with the heat belling upwards against a furious drift as if they had the constancy of wax and the spires unmoored from its belly turned in its wake like the splintered lances of knights invisible but for the stars eclipsed by their passing. And the engines fired madly. The twinned set mounted in the stern were one dead and the other dying, the portside machinery sputtering smoke from the exhaust and the starboard detached and disintegrating in midair and the whole of the ship descending like some pyrogenic ore loosed from the sun.

All that night figures could be seen egressing the wreckage. Beings like stenciled apparitions shifting shade to shade in the warping firelight like the faint afterlives of some violent sect of the damned who in this vague existence bore a semblance of man and were perhaps of as much substance. They stitched across the face of the waters bleeding and dying and crying aloud for the intercession of a pantheon no less silent than those ravenous entities who cry themselves for blood and the blood of sons and more blood. And then they are gone in the darkness.

In the raw redness of the dawn the pilot appears. Fallen out this glass fanged portal pursued by fire adown this welted superstructure. To tarmac. It rises. It goes to the edge of the ship and steps off into a roiling rutilant smoke. Far below a dull slap of water. The waves crashing into another. And stilling. And stilling. It bursts upwards and a bloody froth regurgitates into a blackish harbor beclot with corpse through which it must wade like some doleful sinner wrought out of a lake of blood. To this shore where fire has barbered the sedge. Up this embankment of ash, this concrete webbed by fissure, under a crumbled bridge where gray gilleted crows roost in terror on the girders. It looks up, all their avians eyes upon it, goes on. Ascends the narrow turns of these stairs. At the top a guardrail in improbable contortion. Here the road. Slabs of macadam like a pair of ophidian vertebrates hammered out upon the earth whereon in scattering its fellow starfarers sit bestilled by the sheer immensity of their infortunes.

A few turned to watch it. That dark ananias. As if it were some fabled faith healer called upon to bring out the dead among that rabble of bloodblacked maimfolk no less drenched in blood itself. A parabolic gash wound about its right adder's eye and that eye was cracked and flushed with blood, the capillaries all broken up and a hellish terra incognita contained within those tinctured pupils. Its right arm was splayed to a silver sheening bone and its trousers were wet with blood and its jacket wore dark unblinking eyelets around little shards of glass like the monuments of a rabid and parasitic denomination and its undershirt clung to it like a scab. In these tattered cerements it seemed a creature baptized in the liquefied bones of prior species as if somehow this impostor had usurped the blessing of antecessors with whom no lineage was shared save in the common temporality derived from that elemental egg which exploded the universe.

Nothing was said and it shambled mutely past the mazy ranks of the stunned and inambulate to the border of a sylvan hell beyond the roadside whereupon a rude stump like a throne it set and beheld the dusty gotterdammerung land where had terminated its fall.

A broiling hellscape. General with fire and germed with sparks flurried on searwinds blown for to gasp the land dry. In the west lay an apocalyptic backtrack through an old world forest. A long breach of trees erred and smoking like censers along a cauterized trough. Its eyes drifted. Here I am. All before an inferno. All behind a cinerary waste.

The pilot didnt know how long it set there. When it woke it was without knowledge that it had woken or even that it had slept at all. Standing before it now was a waterbearer. A diminutive creature in a shawl of silicate rage. It carried in its arms an urn and it gave it...him. Her. Gave her water to drink. Tilting up the urn by the base. The pilot closed her eyes. The water was cool and good. When the urn let down again she opened her eyes and the waterbearer was staring back at her frail and unafraid in a clapping hurricane of fire that absolved in one ashy gust this benevolent phantom from sight and no amount of scrying would recall even a trace of it for it was gone. Nor was there any other to see for save herself there was no soul other upon the road for even from that nubilated terrain had the sun routed the survivors for all that they had yet been in darkness.

First off the reasoning is fair enough. Lord knows I can be excessive in writing so Ill see about streamlining it for clarity.

On another note something perhaps a tangent to the above conversation the courage of people. Well I think the tragedy is that most people don't have any courage when it comes to their convictions and are for whatever reason perfectly willing to shut up and go along with the crowd. The evidence for that is all around us. Take a look at the campaign. How many people repudiate Trump in private but are unwilling to risk their careers in opposing him or people who look at BLM with concern and would speak up but for fear of being labeled a racist.

Obviously political examples but the same holds true in every sphere of human interaction. If we take this back to the realm of art Ill argue that artists are the custodians of a civilization. For better or worse they are the ones who select what in a culture is forgotten or remembered and as artists we enshrine certain events of history in the cultural memory as moments when its values are most fully expressed.

The Alamo is an instance of this with its dozens of films, ballads, plays, books, what have you that depict selflessness, a willingness to hold certain values as more valuable than life, of courage, of morality. Take the examples of the captivity narratives of the Puritans who saw their experiences as tests of faith and acts of spiritual regeneration. Or the dust bowl, immortalized in the Grapes of Wrath. The Romans had Virgil, the Greeks had Homer.

But of course culture isn't static, it experiences epochs. The western culture has in its resume the Greeks, the Romans, the Germans, The Anglos, the Irish, the Indians, even Semitic influences distilled through the King James Bible.

For the layman to reckon with these influences is I think asking the impossible and thus it falls to the artist who dedicates his life, who more than likely will fail, to this grappling in order that his civilization is constantly renewed through the production of new works and new interpretations which are really new modes of thought. Absent of these efforts a civilization quickly becomes shorn of its historical and cultural roots and very quickly stagnates and dies.

Haha this is getting so off topic but no its great to talk about it. If I do pull any of this off itll be an alignment of the stars. If the stars align itll then be a miracle if I make any money off of it.

Bukowski said: If youre doing it for money or fame, don't do it. jesus said you cant serve god and mammon

More than not being a consideration in my opinion it cant be a consideration. If your primary concern is generating a cash flow than you've already compromised your vision and in fact it could well be argued that's its not you writing the work but the audience whoever they may be with whatever expectations. When you modify a truth or omit it completely because it makes the story unpalatable to the public or because theres a more generic way to write than you might as well not write at all because theres always a thousand people who will write to the lowest denominator simply and in most cases vacuously. But you have any concern for truth you have to put that aside and tell your truth in your own words and part of that is accepting that you might be a failure and that everything will come to naught.

Roosevelt said 'It is not the critic who counts'. Kipling on the same note wrote 'If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you but make allowance for the doubting too.

Anything else besides this if youre truly pursuing truth is a betrayal of that truth and thus a betrayal of the self.

Eight days into her journey she came to an old battlesite, a lithic arboreal of branchless trunks of quartz like polished columns of some sacked acropolis. The grounds extended two miles and the miles were littered with a regiment's worth of bones and shattered disc of araucaria bred for those cold climes, those high heights.

She meandered through the dusty bonework relieving the dead of their clothes, removing their boots to see if any sock had been preserved. She turned pouch and pocket for their artifacts. She found a calculus of a doll head and komodo bones and a shard from a luopan. She pulled the rucksack off an operator suited in power armor and opened its main compartment to find inside lady's undergarments at which she tossed aside only to find more. Indeed it was stuffed and soon the air was full of a vibrant rain of satin casimoles and black bodices and cream gossamer corsets with silk lacing and purple thongs and ecclesiastic fishnets and gothic tangas each article flung aloft with increasing alarm until in abhorred confusion she must run with arms aflail in a circle some minutes to calm down.

Later she found a surgical kit. She laid out the bandages in a quilt configuration and laid upon that ampules and instruments, laid them quite neatly out and named and numbered them and replaced them back.

Last of all she found the shriveled heart of some igneous heresiarch. She reached through the broken ribs and pulled it free. It was the mottled color of old blood and she set amongst the smooth boles like dead ventricles themselves studying it in the twilight and in the dark to follow she augured it with a rusty jobber bit and threaded it with ginger strands of hair. She had still the silver fetish and she compared them to another as if they might be somehow related or components of a larger whole but she could not yet piece them together and she donned the amulet to wear against her breast.

Two days later she came upon the village of Isprachy. She had crested a hill and it was there below without warning. She dropped to her belly. She could hear nothing but birds. The stir of grass. She parted it.

The village was a dense collection of domas, their gardens. Power lines each pole drifted down a single road footed to an enormous cairn of skeletons many with spikes loose between the fingerbones. Of others there were none. She crawled back from the crest and got up into a crouch and peeked out again and watched for movement and seeing none circled the village keeping low and behind the treelings where they grew and was soon away from the place.

She made camp early in the afternoon about seven miles south near a stream and took inventory of her findings thus far. As told she had accumulated something of a mobile wardrobe and she repaired her own costume with the best of those she'd salvaged. She cut the fur cuffs off a jacket and sewed them together then sewed that to the back of her shirt's collar. She padded the shirt then with kevlar from a flak jacket and the inlinings of other articles and topped them with the smooth silk of a base layer. The rest she stitched into a kind of haphazard shelter, not tent, not leanto, not much of anything but a cover that would shade her of starlight.

She removed her mismatched footwear, the ICB and the hiking boot and the rainbow sock and its newspaper padded half pair and felt the callouses on her soles. The back of one heel had blistered and she pinched away the dead translucent skin and let the serum leak out. She fell onto her back and hiked the leg straight up and let the rain wash her foot and then she wiped the blister down with an alcohol pad and covered it in moleskin from the kit. Then she took the hiking boot and a knife and scraped away about a fifth of an inch from the inside of the heel and tried it on again. It was still too tight and she shaved a little more and then it fit well.

In the last gray of light she walked the stream in search of flint but could find nothing. She built a trellis of twigs and packed its insides with leaves as dry as she could find. Then she took a loose round and tried to pull off the bullet but her fingers kept slipping off. She got a small stone to use as a fulcrum and with another bashed the bullet out of the casing and emptied the powder over the leaves and did likewise with a second round. Then she took her knife and raked it against the stone. It produced no sparks. She tried striking the bayonet against it and to strike the knife against the mosin's receiver and stock all without avail. She bit her thumb. Then she took one of the empty casings and held it so that its top was flush against the powder and jammed the knife into the primer. The casing popped out of her fingers. The powder caught but died down almost immediately. She tried again and this time there was not even a flare. She sat for a long while in the dark and after a while she picked up her things and relocated some ways away and laid down for the night to sleep.

No sleep came. She lay shivering in her poor protection little better than the scrannel hide that malefic intellect inhabited listening to the exhausted tune of her cardial illharmony. Sometime in the night she caught wind of deer and in the morning she cut the track of the bevy and followed them south some ten miles to a meadow.

There were about a hundred yards away when she sighted in on them. Cradling the rifle between a double trunk. They were six in number and she let the front sight hover over each in turn. A roebuck. A doe. A doe. A fawn. A fawn. A doe. The roebuck. The fawn.

The nagant kicked. A fawn folded over its shattered shoulder. The bevy ran. She shot the second fawn ere it could reach the safety of the trees and it froze midstride and slid on the ground in a wave of muddy water.

She walked out and stood over the first fawn watching its jaws titter and clack. She planted the blade of her knife in its eye and went on to the second. She kicked it in the rump and hopscotched twixt its bucking legs and stomped on its head and pirouetted and hopped off and kicked it again. It screamed the while. She unslung the mosin-nagant and bashed its skull in and went back to the first and bayoneted it in the gut to death.

Some miles from the site of the kills she stopped abruptly and pondering hard a moment turned fast round and ran. By the time she got back to the meadow it was almost dark. She gutted the animals and ate them raw and layered herself doubly in their bloody skins.

Come down now harder weathers. Ragged rain inkish as lightning, one to mask the mountains the other to relieve them out of the nightbrume. She tried to hold it. That fog that briefly seemed the ethereal dark. She cupped her hands and parted it with her thumbs and parted and cut and hissed furiously dark that holds be a thing to be held.

Two weeks later she was at the M5 highway. Repaved in a joint venture between the colonies and the administrative AI of Chelyabinsk. A light traffic hummed to the latterday town of Kearny through which the river Sim ran through. The ferries were docked by many but the streets had not too many pedestrians and those out of doors hurried to be in.

Saes feller come rown inna begboat ye call musz stove it agether.

She watched the traffic dwindle to a cease with the close of day and the town shrink to a saffronic nebula pacifically shading the idle spiry smoke. Away of this glow in the becamed dark she scapered across the road to the southern foothills and wandered about its bare slopes in search of a hiding place for her things. She picked up on a trail demarked on either side by gravel shoulders and along this route was a minuscule gongen torii bedraped with scalps and hung from its kasagi the skull of a man and on the opposing side that of a wolf. She shoved her belongings in the gate and then moved to scout the town from new angles before venturing down.

In the streets she skirted urinous pools of lamplight, ducking in and out of backyards with an eye to the clotheslines for good wears but all had been put up for the rain.

She looted a shed of an axe and used it to break the latch off a chicken coop. Standing a moment in attunement to noise were any awakened. She went in and came out carrying a headless chicken under either arm.

She axed to death an alleydweller asleep against a dumpster. Standing over him practicing her strikes until her aim was sure and so assured delivered the bit into his brain. He died instantly. When she wrenched the axe free a fan of blood sprayed out the cleft and subsided. She rifled through his clothes but he had nothing and she went on.

Coming out of the alley onto the sidewalk she saw three figures grouped upstreet outside what was a bar for the neon luminescence reflected in the streetwater. She hung her head. When she looked up one of the figures had an arm raised in her direction. The axe clanged loud against the pavement. She snatched it up by the haft and ran dragging it behind. She dashed onto the boardwalk between two houses and collided with trashbins there and kicked out of rotted pickles and collapsed into glass. Houses heretofore dark filled with light. Someone shouted. She rose again and sprinted on frighting cats and dogs in the backyards came slamming against the low stone walls howling like demons in thirst of souls. She crashed out of the alley and was suddenly at the edge of town and she scrambled up into the dimmer strata of light that illumined the face of the hill and she thought she would never be got way of it.

Eight days into her journey she came to an old battlesite, a lithic arboreal of branchless trunks of quartz like polished columns of some sacked acropolis. The grounds extended two miles and the miles were littered with a regiment's worth of bones and shattered disc of araucaria bred for those cold climes, those high heights.

She meandered through the dusty bonework relieving the dead of their clothes, removing their boots to see if any sock had been preserved. She turned pouch and pocket for their artifacts. She found a calculus of a doll head and komodo bones and a shard from a luopan. She pulled the rucksack off an operator suited in power armor and opened its main compartment to find inside lady's undergarments at which she tossed aside only to find more. Indeed it was stuffed and soon the air was full of a vibrant rain of satin casimoles and black bodices and cream gossamer corsets with silk lacing and purple thongs and ecclesiastic fishnets and gothic tangas each article flung aloft with increasing alarm until in abhorred confusion she must run with arms aflail in a circle some minutes to calm down.

Later she found a surgical kit. She laid out the bandages in a quilt configuration and laid upon that ampules and instruments, laid them quite neatly out and named and numbered them and replaced them back.

Last of all she found the shriveled heart of some igneous heresiarch. She reached through the broken ribs and pulled it free. It was the mottled color of old blood and she set amongst the smooth boles like dead ventricles themselves studying it in the twilight and in the dark to follow she augured it with a rusty jobber bit and threaded it with ginger strands of hair. She had still the silver fetish and she compared them to another as if they might be somehow related or components of a larger whole but she could not yet piece them together and she donned the amulet to wear against her breast.

Two days later she came upon the village of Isprachy. She had crested a hill and it was there below without warning. She dropped to her belly. She could hear nothing but birds. The stir of grass. She parted it.

The village was a dense collection of domas, their gardens. Power lines each pole drifted down a single road footed to an enormous cairn of skeletons many with spikes loose between the fingerbones. Of others there were none. She crawled back from the crest and got up into a crouch and peeked out again and watched for movement and seeing none circled the village keeping low and behind the treelings where they grew and was soon away from the place.

She made camp early in the afternoon about seven miles south near a stream and took inventory of her findings thus far. As told she had accumulated something of a mobile wardrobe and she repaired her own costume with the best of those she'd salvaged. She cut the fur cuffs off a jacket and sewed them together then sewed that to the back of her shirt's collar. She padded the shirt then with kevlar from a flak jacket and the inlinings of other articles and topped them with the smooth silk of a base layer. The rest she stitched into a kind of haphazard shelter, not tent, not leanto, not much of anything but a cover that would shade her of starlight.

She removed her mismatched footwear, the ICB and the hiking boot and the rainbow sock and its newspaper padded half pair and felt the callouses on her soles. The back of one heel had blistered and she pinched away the dead translucent skin and let the serum leak out. She fell onto her back and hiked the leg straight up and let the rain wash her foot and then she wiped the blister down with an alcohol pad and covered it in moleskin from the kit. Then she took the hiking boot and a knife and scraped away about a fifth of an inch from the inside of the heel and tried it on again. It was still too tight and she shaved a little more and then it fit well.

In the last gray of light she walked the stream in search of flint but could find nothing. She built a trellis of twigs and packed its insides with leaves as dry as she could find. Then she took a loose round and tried to pull off the bullet but her fingers kept slipping off. She got a small stone to use as a fulcrum and with another bashed the bullet out of the casing and emptied the powder over the leaves and did likewise with a second round. Then she took her knife and raked it against the stone. It produced no sparks. She tried striking the bayonet against it and to strike the knife against the mosin's receiver and stock all without avail. She bit her thumb. Then she took one of the empty casings and held it so that its top was flush against the powder and jammed the knife into the primer. The casing popped out of her fingers. The powder caught but died down almost immediately. She tried again and this time there was not even a flare. She sat for a long while in the dark and after a while she picked up her things and relocated some ways away and laid down for the night to sleep.

No sleep came. She lay shivering in her poor protection little better than the scrannel hide that malefic intellect inhabited listening to the exhausted tune of her cardial illharmony. Sometime in the night she caught wind of deer and in the morning she cut the track of the bevy and followed them south some ten miles to a meadow.

There were about a hundred yards away when she sighted in on them. Cradling the rifle between a double trunk. They were six in number and she let the front sight hover over each in turn. A roebuck. A doe. A doe. A fawn. A fawn. A doe. The roebuck. The fawn.

The nagant kicked. A fawn folded over its shattered shoulder. The bevy ran. She shot the second fawn ere it could reach the safety of the trees and it froze midstride and slid on the ground in a wave of muddy water.

She walked out and stood over the first fawn watching its jaws titter and clack. She planted the blade of her knife in its eye and went on to the second. She kicked it in the rump and hopscotched twixt its bucking legs and stomped on its head and pirouetted and hopped off and kicked it again. It screamed the while. She unslung the mosin-nagant and bashed its skull in and went back to the first and bayoneted it in the gut to death.

Some miles from the site of the kills she stopped abruptly and pondering hard a moment turned fast round and ran. By the time she got back to the meadow it was almost dark. She gutted the animals and ate them raw and layered herself doubly in their bloody skins.

Come down now harder weathers. Ragged rain inkish as lightning, one to mask the mountains the other to relieve them out of the nightbrume. She tried to hold it. That fog that briefly seemed the ethereal dark. She cupped her hands and parted it with her thumbs and parted and cut and hissed furiously dark that holds be a thing to be held.

Two weeks later she was at the M5 highway. Repaved in a joint venture between the colonies and the administrative AI of Chelyabinsk. A light traffic hummed to the latterday town of Kearny through which the river Sim ran through. The ferries were docked by many but the streets had not too many pedestrians and those out of doors hurried to be in.

Saes feller come rown inna begboat ye call musz stove it agether.

She watched the traffic dwindle to a cease with the close of day and the town shrink to a saffronic nebula pacifically shading the idle spiry smoke. Away of this glow in the becamed dark she scapered across the road to the southern foothills and wandered about its bare slopes in search of a hiding place for her things. She picked up on a trail demarked on either side by gravel shoulders and along this route was a minuscule gongen torii bedraped with scalps and hung from its kasagi the skull of a man and on the opposing side that of a wolf. She shoved her belongings in the gate and then moved to scout the town from new angles before venturing down.

In the streets she skirted urinous pools of lamplight, ducking in and out of backyards with an eye to the clotheslines for good wears but all had been put up for the rain.

She looted a shed of an axe and used it to break the latch off a chicken coop. Standing a moment in attunement to noise were any awakened. She went in and came out carrying a headless chicken under either arm.

She axed to death an alleydweller asleep against a dumpster. Standing over him practicing her strikes until her aim was sure and so assured delivered the bit into his brain. He died instantly. When she wrenched the axe free a fan of blood sprayed out the cleft and subsided. She rifled through his clothes but he had nothing and she went on.

Coming out of the alley onto the sidewalk she saw three figures grouped upstreet outside what was a bar for the neon luminescence reflected in the streetwater. She hung her head. When she looked up one of the figures had an arm raised in her direction. The axe clanged loud against the pavement. She snatched it up by the haft and ran dragging it behind. She dashed onto the boardwalk between two houses and collided with trashbins there and kicked out of rotted pickles and collapsed into glass. Houses heretofore dark filled with light. Someone shouted. She rose again and sprinted on frighting cats and dogs in the backyards came slamming against the low stone walls howling like demons in thirst of souls. She crashed out of the alley and was suddenly at the edge of town and she scrambled up into the dimmer strata of light that illumined the face of the hill and she thought she would never be got way of it.

Eight days into her journey she came to an old battlesite, a lithic arboreal of branchless trunks of quartz like polished columns of some sacked acropolis. The grounds extended two miles and the miles were littered with a regiment's worth of bones and shattered disc of araucaria bred for those cold climes, those high heights.

Quite vivid description. Should 'disc' be 'discs'? What are 'araucaria'?

Later she found a surgical kit. She laid out the bandages in a quilt configuration and laid upon that ampules and instruments, laid them quite neatly out and named and numbered them and replaced them back.

Last of all she found the shriveled heart of some igneous heresiarch. She reached through the broken ribs and pulled it free. It was the mottled color of old blood and she set amongst the smooth boles like dead ventricles themselves studying it in the twilight and in the dark to follow she augured it with a rusty jobber bit and threaded it with ginger strands of hair. She had still the silver fetish and she compared them to another as if they might be somehow related or components of a larger whole but she could not yet piece them together and she donned the amulet to wear against her breast.

The amulet is the silver fetish or the shrivelled heart?

Power lines each pole drifted down a single road footed to an enormous cairn of skeletons many with spikes loose between the fingerbones. Of others there were none.

Do you means there are power lines moored at each pole, or end, of the village, or that there is a row of poles for power lines down the central road?

If the former, then 'moored at each pole of the village' is better than just 'each pole': 'were threaded' or 'ran the length', would be better than 'drifted', as the latter suggests the lines were moving, not moored and static, as I assume there are.

If the latter, 'power lines were hung in a sequence from a series of poles' would make it clearer-and my replacement for 'drifted' would still be more apt.

There were about a hundred yards away when she sighted in on them. Cradling the rifle between a double trunk. They were six in number and she let the front sight hover over each in turn. A roebuck. A doe. A doe. A fawn. A fawn. A doe. The roebuck. The fawn.

You said there was six-then list eight.

Two weeks later she was at the M5 highway.

We are in some post-apocalyptic Britain, then?

Saes feller come rown inna begboat ye call musz stove it agether.

Sounds like dialogue. You don't use quotation marks or say who's talking.

She dashed onto the boardwalk between two houses and collided with trashbins

Thought this was Britain from the 'M5' allusion: 'boardwalk' and 'trashbins' sounds American, though. Unless there is an M5 in America, too?

she thought she would never be got way of it.

Thought she would never get past it, you mean?

I think you describe the determined and ruthless, where necessary, character of the main character very well.

Eight days into her journey she came to an old battlesite, a lithic arboreal of branchless trunks of quartz like polished columns of some sacked acropolis. The grounds extended two miles and the miles were littered with a regiment's worth of bones and shattered disc of araucaria bred for those cold climes, those high heights.

She meandered through the dusty bonework relieving the dead of their clothes, removing their boots to see if any sock had been preserved. She turned pouch and pocket for their artifacts. She found a calculus of a doll head and komodo bones and a shard from a luopan. She pulled the rucksack off an operator suited in power armor and opened its main compartment to find inside lady's undergarments at which she tossed aside only to find more. Indeed it was stuffed and soon the air was full of a vibrant rain of satin casimoles and black bodices and cream gossamer corsets with silk lacing and purple thongs and ecclesiastic fishnets and gothic tangas each article flung aloft with increasing alarm until in abhorred confusion she must run with arms aflail in a circle some minutes to calm down.

Later she found a surgical kit. She laid out the bandages in a quilt configuration and laid upon that ampules and instruments, laid them quite neatly out and named and numbered them and replaced them back.

Last of all she found the shriveled heart of some igneous heresiarch. She reached through the broken ribs and pulled it free. It was the mottled color of old blood and she set amongst the smooth boles like dead ventricles themselves studying it in the twilight and in the dark to follow she augured it with a rusty jobber bit and threaded it with ginger strands of hair. She had still the silver fetish and she compared them to another as if they might be somehow related or components of a larger whole but she could not yet piece them together and she donned the amulet to wear against her breast.

Two days later she came upon the village of Isprachy. She had crested a hill and it was there below without warning. She dropped to her belly. She could hear nothing but birds. The stir of grass. She parted it.

The village was a dense collection of domas, their gardens. Power lines each pole drifted down a single road footed to an enormous cairn of skeletons many with spikes loose between the fingerbones. Of others there were none. She crawled back from the crest and got up into a crouch and peeked out again and watched for movement and seeing none circled the village keeping low and behind the treelings where they grew and was soon away from the place.

She made camp early in the afternoon about seven miles south near a stream and took inventory of her findings thus far. As told she had accumulated something of a mobile wardrobe and she repaired her own costume with the best of those she'd salvaged. She cut the fur cuffs off a jacket and sewed them together then sewed that to the back of her shirt's collar. She padded the shirt then with kevlar from a flak jacket and the inlinings of other articles and topped them with the smooth silk of a base layer. The rest she stitched into a kind of haphazard shelter, not tent, not leanto, not much of anything but a cover that would shade her of starlight.

She removed her mismatched footwear, the ICB and the hiking boot and the rainbow sock and its newspaper padded half pair and felt the callouses on her soles. The back of one heel had blistered and she pinched away the dead translucent skin and let the serum leak out. She fell onto her back and hiked the leg straight up and let the rain wash her foot and then she wiped the blister down with an alcohol pad and covered it in moleskin from the kit. Then she took the hiking boot and a knife and scraped away about a fifth of an inch from the inside of the heel and tried it on again. It was still too tight and she shaved a little more and then it fit well.

In the last gray of light she walked the stream in search of flint but could find nothing. She built a trellis of twigs and packed its insides with leaves as dry as she could find. Then she took a loose round and tried to pull off the bullet but her fingers kept slipping off. She got a small stone to use as a fulcrum and with another bashed the bullet out of the casing and emptied the powder over the leaves and did likewise with a second round. Then she took her knife and raked it against the stone. It produced no sparks. She tried striking the bayonet against it and to strike the knife against the mosin's receiver and stock all without avail. She bit her thumb. Then she took one of the empty casings and held it so that its top was flush against the powder and jammed the knife into the primer. The casing popped out of her fingers. The powder caught but died down almost immediately. She tried again and this time there was not even a flare. She sat for a long while in the dark and after a while she picked up her things and relocated some ways away and laid down for the night to sleep.

No sleep came. She lay shivering in her poor protection little better than the scrannel hide that malefic intellect inhabited listening to the exhausted tune of her cardial illharmony. Sometime in the night she caught wind of deer and in the morning she cut the track of the bevy and followed them south some ten miles to a meadow.

There were about a hundred yards away when she sighted in on them. Cradling the rifle between a double trunk. They were six in number and she let the front sight hover over each in turn. A roebuck. A doe. A doe. A fawn. A fawn. A doe. The roebuck. The fawn.

The nagant kicked. A fawn folded over its shattered shoulder. The bevy ran. She shot the second fawn ere it could reach the safety of the trees and it froze midstride and slid on the ground in a wave of muddy water.

She walked out and stood over the first fawn watching its jaws titter and clack. She planted the blade of her knife in its eye and went on to the second. She kicked it in the rump and hopscotched twixt its bucking legs and stomped on its head and pirouetted and hopped off and kicked it again. It screamed the while. She unslung the mosin-nagant and bashed its skull in and went back to the first and bayoneted it in the gut to death.

Some miles from the site of the kills she stopped abruptly and pondering hard a moment turned fast round and ran. By the time she got back to the meadow it was almost dark. She gutted the animals and ate them raw and layered herself doubly in their bloody skins.

Come down now harder weathers. Ragged rain inkish as lightning, one to mask the mountains the other to relieve them out of the nightbrume. She tried to hold it. That fog that briefly seemed the ethereal dark. She cupped her hands and parted it with her thumbs and parted and cut and hissed furiously dark that holds be a thing to be held.

Two weeks later she was at the M5 highway. Repaved in a joint venture between the colonies and the administrative AI of Chelyabinsk. A light traffic hummed to the latterday town of Kearny through which the river Sim ran through. The ferries were docked by many but the streets had not too many pedestrians and those out of doors hurried to be in.

Saes feller come rown inna begboat ye call musz stove it agether.

She watched the traffic dwindle to a cease with the close of day and the town shrink to a saffronic nebula pacifically shading the idle spiry smoke. Away of this glow in the becamed dark she scapered across the road to the southern foothills and wandered about its bare slopes in search of a hiding place for her things. She picked up on a trail demarked on either side by gravel shoulders and along this route was a minuscule gongen torii bedraped with scalps and hung from its kasagi the skull of a man and on the opposing side that of a wolf. She shoved her belongings in the gate and then moved to scout the town from new angles before venturing down.

In the streets she skirted urinous pools of lamplight, ducking in and out of backyards with an eye to the clotheslines for good wears but all had been put up for the rain.

She looted a shed of an axe and used it to break the latch off a chicken coop. Standing a moment in attunement to noise were any awakened. She went in and came out carrying a headless chicken under either arm.

She axed to death an alleydweller asleep against a dumpster. Standing over him practicing her strikes until her aim was sure and so assured delivered the bit into his brain. He died instantly. When she wrenched the axe free a fan of blood sprayed out the cleft and subsided. She rifled through his clothes but he had nothing and she went on.

Coming out of the alley onto the sidewalk she saw three figures grouped upstreet outside what was a bar for the neon luminescence reflected in the streetwater. She hung her head. When she looked up one of the figures had an arm raised in her direction. The axe clanged loud against the pavement. She snatched it up by the haft and ran dragging it behind. She dashed onto the boardwalk between two houses and collided with trashbins there and kicked out of rotted pickles and collapsed into glass. Houses heretofore dark filled with light. Someone shouted. She rose again and sprinted on frighting cats and dogs in the backyards came slamming against the low stone walls howling like demons in thirst of souls. She crashed out of the alley and was suddenly at the edge of town and she scrambled up into the dimmer strata of light that illumined the face of the hill and she thought she would never be got way of it.

Power lines each pole drifted down>>> maybe: Power lines. Each pole drifting down...

As a reader I will soon want some explanation of time and place and circumstance. The odd modern references mixed with the old beg clarity to place this bitch. Maybe you won't give it and surprise me? Maybe.

@phoenix good eyes. disc should be discs. And as for the deer. Theres still only six the idea was to show what she's aiming at. So quick fix is to just say 'Back to the roebuck. To the fawn.'

As for the fetish it comes from the first novel:

The squaw was rooting in her trinket box and at length lifted out a silver chain to which a trio of statuettes were gallowed. She fed the chain through the drilled phalange and clasped the loop. She gestured for the child to see. The child raised her hand and turned it. The figures dangled at her wrist painted horrors, the chain soldered into their necks and their hung heads and fallen countenances beholding theirselves gagged in barbed wire and dripping hands emerging from their nailed feet reached up as if to strangle them to a second death.

I never really want to resay something from novel to novel, ive always felt like that's filler and has no place so this is something I'm going to have to ponder over the next few years. its something easily done but not easily done well. I suppose the way I'm leaning is to give different shades of metaphor to it. show it that is to say from the different character's perspective, what it looks like to them. the whole world being something of a rorschach blot

She ran the night and walked the morn into a noon then an afternoon and slept on the wet earth and woke to rain and her amongst stones. She opened one with the axe and when she lifted it the stone clung to the head. She cast off the axe as if it were hot. She studied the country about. She took off a boot and toed the axe cautiously. The haft, the blade, the lodestone. It was cold. She pulled it from the poll and held it up. She buried it in the ground ten minutes and dug it back up and tested would it remain magnetized and lo it was. She washed it in a nearby pond and licked it. She tossed it aloft and muttered to it a stutterous inquiry of groans but this magnetism was indifferent to all.

Two days later there was a formation of planes. Bombers that transited silent across the gray. She was squatting on a boulder pulling off her toenails with a pair of pliers and when she saw them she began to rail.

Liar! Is a liar! Is lie! Is a lie! Wesnt ye of telled. Wesent nevered ye but nothin.

They slipped into the horizon as the self never can. She looked at her toes. They were bleeding all. At that moment her stomach grumbled and she drew her knife and stabbed her belly. She could get the point to the peritoneum but to saw across was a pain she could not endure and she opened herself only an inch before dropping to her knees with her teeth clenched and her fists trembling in rage.

Hard days of brutish misery. The rain came cold down. She followed the mountains. Huge pale spined ranges like the backs of fished leviathans laid in the founding of the world weathered to the rachis for all that they seemed immune to weathers, this colder rain that fell, this water that charged down their draws thick with leaves like engorged cells in a lurid cruor or rancid drainage out the inexpiable chambers of the mount's cystful heart.

She walked her boots paper thin, she wore her feet to bleeding. Trudging daylight betwixt the caliginous islands of time on buckling legs that would have failed hours before they did were it not for her rifle she weighed against and when they failed rising and falling and crawling that her hands hardened to the place she would pass out and rising again unshed of weariness like the dead gaunter each dawn, contracting hour by hour to misery, all feet, all hands, all things tactile, all things pain, knowing nothing higher than bark or stone, the wet earth luxury, pissing walking, bleeding walking, stopping to defecate only at night, only painfully, seeing grass or mud, never raising her head to see more than ten feet before her, five feet, her bleeding toes, being afraid of everything, praying without praying for rain to keep her inaudible, to start at ever moment even herself her moments of clarity to be afraid to be afraid to be terrified to watch the stars in the brief terrifying respites from rain. To eat nothing but herself. To eat nothing. To be numb. Numb. Unholy. To hate everything from the inside. To wring out of the muscles she has eaten one more day one more hour one more step. Another step. Another step. Before sleep. All the way. To serve their turn. And serve. And hold on long after even the will that says hold on is gone and indifferent and so hold on in the brute enduring that beasts do not have. The unknowing enduring that the faithless do not have. The hopeless enduring the faithful do not have. The futile enduring only the chosen have, that are indomitable, that do not lie down to die after cresting the last peak, to see the mountains ranging forever out of sight.

Twenty three days in the mountains, as many in the rain. She stared down at the fork of the Inzer. The town was gone but for a bare slouched deep in the river. Favored stop of pilgrims and maleficence. A bawdy din slurred out of its batboards and its glow was sinister and sapphirine and cut through by dark occlusions. Boats were moored at its docks. Cuddies or scows. A few canoes. She checked to see what she might need no more than herself to row.

As she did so a man stumbled out of the bar to piss. He saw her and fished his pointed hand at her drunkenly and hitched himself up and went back inside. She hung her head. She could smell alcohol. The blood. She shouldered up her gear and went down the pier to the shack and pushed through the doors.

Inside was a doggish frape of souls at no tables but stools like demagogic poets awaiting to speak. There was a bar. A jukebox. Whores. Glowsticks lay everywhere and were together with the lit ends of cigars and cigarillos altogether insufficient to illumine their fumid confines. The bar was that low it rocked and water would atimes surge up through the floorboards. She went up to the bar and let her things down and put one leg through the ruckstrap and tried climbing onto a stool but her arms were weak and she failed and she rested a moment and tried again and one of the men at the bar boosted her up. She looked at him warily. As if she were hurt. Then she looked at the barman.

Wheskey, she said.

The bartender was cleaning glasses at the sink.

Heys.

I cant serve you whiskey.

Burbuns then.

Cant that neither.

Aint no rusk is ye?

The bartender set the glass on a dry rack. Im never that.

Well vodk then ifn its alls yays got.

I cant serve that either.

Well what sorta hell cane ye serve?

I cant serve you.

Ta fucks not?

Because youre flatter than canvas.

Dachni slipped from the stool to the floor and got the Caring pistol and took a deep breath and hoofed back up onto the stool and pointed it at him. Some of the men in the room let theirs hands fall to their sidearms. Some of the whores scuttled.

Shit kid, said the bartender.

Pour sumthin.

Hell, said the helping man, let her drink.

The bartender got a shot glass and filled it with vodka and set it before her.

Dachni stuck the pistol in her belt. She took up the glass and drank.

How much?

Two dollars.

Dachni searched her pockets but she had no money. Well, she said. Well. Can be for sweeps.

They gotta nigger for sweepin, said the helping man. Ye think it could sweep its shadow damn dirty as it is but it just throws it all over. Hard times on the waters you cant hire a white man to keep your floors.

Dachni looked at the bartender. How comes ye ta has a nigger?

Dont worry about my nigger. Worry about my money.

The man dropped two dollars on the bar. Its on me.

She looked shy at him.

He smiled and put his elbows on the bar. Howd you get here? he said.

Walkin, she said.
Where from?

Bouts nare Perm. Lel southy of it.

You didnt walk all the way down from there.

Walked.

Hear that Denver? Walked from Perm. Hell thats near two hundred miles.

A man can walk whats his mind, said Denver from down the bar.

You look about worn to marrow.

Ok.

How old are you kiddo? said Denver. He turned his tumbler by its rim.

She didnt answer.

Shit you dont look eight. Whens your birthday?

Dachni finished her drink. She stared into the glass bottom.

The man laid another pair of dollars on the counter. Have another one, he said.

She sorted a mouseskin bag from her rucksack and opened it up for the man to see. He peered in and then he looked away.
Aint goin take none? she said.

The man let drop a grungy wad of bills on the bar and leaned through and sorted through the mouseskin and withdrew two molars and pocketed them.
Where are you headed?

Dachni pocketed the bag struggled back on the stool and called for whiskey. She didnt look at the money. She didnt answer.

Im Erdinger, said Erdinger. Me and Denver run a post boat between here and Bugulchan. Feel like signing on?

The bartender set the whiskey before her and took one of the bills on the counter. She took up the glass and drank.

Are you gonna take your money?

Was whats?

Erdinger nodded at the bills.

The money.

Was for?

The teeth. The silver in the teeth.

Oh. Well. She gathered the bills into a wad and looked at them doubtfully then stuffed them in her pocket.

Where are you going? said Denver.

Jess anywhere.

You want to sign on with us? We run a seventeen day circuit. Hit every town drop the mail take some and head out.

Has ye wheskeys aboards?

We got whiskey.

How comes ye not ta drank it?

Saving it for river time.

Well.

Wage you says a hunnerd dollars, said Denver.

Thass alright.

Brood it some, its good money.

Does what?

She woke on the floor with the river kissing her cheek through the boards. The bar was almost empty. The few patrons who had stayed overnight had bedded down as she had. In her dream she was in a cradle. She sat up and checked that her possessions were not stolen and then she went out to the pier and shirked down her trousers and urinated in the river and went back in.